Stephen King: A Literary Companion

Wood, Rocky. Stephen King: A Literary Companion. Jefferson: McFaiiand, 2011. 214 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-7864-5850-9. $39.95.

In the last decade, a number of books have been published that aim to provide an overview of all or part of Stephen King's vast body of work, thus making it more accessible to fans who might only be familiar with some of his most popular novels. Such studies include Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner's The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King (2006), Stephen Spignesi's The Essential Stephen King (2003), Robin Furth's Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance (2006), and Bev Vincent's The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus (2004). The latest volume with this goal is Rocky Wood's Stephen King: A Literary Companion, part of the McFarland Literary Companions Series (which features authors ranging from Barbara Kingsolver to Cormac McCarthy). From the beginning, Wood is clear about his reasons for writing; as he states, "the purpose of the present work [is] to make the experience of exploring Stephen King's work, whatever the format, that much more enjoyable and interesting" (2).

To accomplish this goal, Wood organizes his book into two sections: an introduction and a literary companion, the latter of which presents brief encyclopedic entries on King's works and the major characters and places within those works. In the introduction, Wood offers a number of possible ways into King's work, depending on how readers initially came into contact with him. He provides suggestions for younger readers, those who love horror, and even readers who think they've "read it all (but actually haven't)" (6). The introduction also provides readers with Wood's list of the top characters in King's fiction, which he describes as characters that "will still resonate in English literature in fifty or one hundred years" (7), along with a brief overview of the different realities that appear throughout King's works, a summary of movie and television adaptations of King's stories, and thoughts about King's place in the literary tradition. While rather fragmented in its presentation, this introduction to the volume is effective in showing the immensity of King's body of work, as well as the vast range of genres and media forms that...